IL TEMPO E L’ASPETTO VERBALE NELL’ITALIANO, NEL TEDESCO E NELL’INTERLINGUA DI APPRENDENTI TEDESCOFONI. TRE SISTEMI LINGUISTICI A CONFRONTO

The present study aims to examine the temporal and aspectual systems in Italian and German, and the development of verbal morphology in the interlanguage of students predominantly with L1 German, learning L2 Italian. Through the analysis of interlanguage samples, composed by narrative texts, the study aims to observe to what extent the interlanguage development is influenced by the differences between the German and the Italian tense-aspect systems. Several studies (see Ayoun & Salaberry, 2005) suggest that learners with L1 that does not mark aspect morphologically (such as German) start using the past tense forms in Romance languages with a temporal rather than an aspectual value. Aspect is integrated into the interlanguage progressively, in the sense that learnersstart using perfective morphology with telic predicates and imperfective morphology with statives. However, several texts written by learners of L2 Italian are characterised by the use of the present as a dominant tense. Since the present is aspectually neutral, these texts do not reveal to what extent the learner is able to mark aspectual distinctions. This study aims, therefore, to 1) classify a sample of texts with the present as the predominant tense into proficiency groups on the basis of their morphosyntactic accuracy (Ellis – Barkhuizen 2005, 139); 2) examine the relationship between morphosyntactic accuracy, and the tendency to produce narrative texts using the present as predominant tense.